Nick Clegg’s success in bringing hitherto ‘won’t vote’ citizens into the Election has, like everything else in the contest, muddied the predictions still further. In a way, it has also added to the distraction from two key facts about voting intentions:

1. Non-voters claiming suddenly to be voters are notoriously bad at turning up on the day.
2. A good half of the electorate still haven’t made their minds up – either to vote at all, or about which Party to support.

I think quite a bit of Nick Clegg’s surge may be mist that will disappear in the heat of the polling booth moment: when either tribal loyalties (or something better on the telly) intervene to vapourise good intentions. But set against this has to be the fact that many of the Undecided are women – and as we’ve seen, Clegg plays well with the female vote.

So all that’s gone before – in this, the age of instant scandal and overnight seismic attitude shifts – could be tipped in another direction entirely by just one or two completely unpredictable events. And as it happens, there is a lot of ‘briefing’ going on right now to suggest that such events will be plastered all over our screens and papers before too long.

The first of these involves the internal war that is New Labour in general, and Lord Mandelson in particular. Despite having rubbished The Slog’s reports of discussions between the LibDems and Labour’s Anyone But Gordon tendency, the UK media have gradually caught up with reality: Mandelson and Miliband have indeed been negotiating with the Cleggies, rather in the manner of Himmler trying to persuade the allies to save the Nazi Party as a bulwark against the Soviets in 1945. However, it appears that things may soon come to light about some of the decision-influencing in which the Business Minister has been involved of late.

The second concerns another Slog running story: the Toff Tiff at the top of the Tory Party.

Among both grassroots and Thatcherite Conservative MPs, the simmering discontent apparent for some months has not boiled over – purely because the Party still knows how to hide dirty linen during an election. George Osborne has been told in no uncertain terms to behave himself; but in private he is seething about the Tory failure to make the deficit – not the economy – central to the election. Lord Tebbit’s appeal today for others at the senior end of the Party to speak up (rather than the campaign appearing to be a One-Cameron band) is just another veiled attempt to get things back to what the Tories do best: telling the voters that they and they alone have the bottle to take the tough decisions.

I understand that a pro-Tory tabloid is in possession of damaging material designed to blackmail part of the Party leadership into a tougher approach. I don’t approve of that – and anyway, I think it’s too late now for any major change of direction to be credible. But in this election, you never know.

There is a disturbing postscript to all this. Once the election is over and (probably) inconclusive, I would be willing to bet that some of these internal schisms will blow the top off the two Parties who have held power since 1921. The upside is that at long last we really will see the collapse of a hegemony that has both managed and accelerated Britain’s post-imperial decline. The downside is that – to currency traders and credit management opinion leaders – it will look as if Britain is falling apart. Anyone suggesting that the Tories are over-egging the pudding of how much damage a squabbling Parliament will do to our commercial outlook is simply living in another solar system.

Whatever the result, there is a rough ride ahead.